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Mary Barton


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Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel, a widely acclaimed work based on the actual murder, in 1831, of a progressive mill owner. It follows Mary Barton, daughter of a man implicated in the murder, through her adolescence, when she suffers the advances of the mill owner, and later through love and marriage. Set in Manchester, between 1837-42, it paints a powerful and moving picture of working-class life in Victorian England.



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Book used in class

I use this book in my undergraduate course on Marx because it so vividly illustrates the living conditions of the English working class in the 1840s. It appeared the same year (1848) as Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto. Although Gaskell's politics are quite different - she believed reconciliation between the classes was possible and desireable whereas Marx did not - her book nevertheless illustrates many of the characterizations of capitalism in such theoretical texts as Marx's Capital in a very human way. The website for that course - http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/357k.html - contains some links to other, related, materials, as well as some powerpoint slides for my lecture on the book and its relationship to Marx's critique of capitalism.

Posted By Harry Cleaver at Tue 24 May 2005, 6:07 PM in Mary Barton || 0 Replies

Mrs Gaskell

If you are a reasonably committed Marxist or at least Marxist scholar as I was as a grad student, you can only find Mrs G's writing entirely ghastly. Syrupy and simplistic, naiively optimistic, as literature it is gawdblimey awful; as a historical document of Victorian living some 15 years after the major reform act, it is reasonable.

Posted By Phil Moseley at Tue 24 May 2005, 6:03 PM in Mary Barton || 1 Reply

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